lit-synthesis

lit-synthesis is a skill for Claude Code from nealcaren/social-data-analysis. It costs 31 tokens per session (2,123 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for deeply reading and organizing a collection of research papers. It uses Zotero, a tool for managing academic references, to map theories, themes, and disagreements in a field.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to group papers by themes or theories, take detailed reading notes, identify debates, and create maps of a research field.
Why use it?
A list of papers does not by itself explain how ideas relate or where researchers disagree. This helps turn a paper collection into an organized understanding ready for writing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the lit-synthesis plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to group papers by themes or theories, take detailed reading notes, identify debates, and create maps of a research field.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nealcaren/social-data-analysis/lit-synthesis
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add nealcaren/social-data-analysis --skill lit-synthesis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nealcaren/social-data-analysis

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install lit-synthesis, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for lit-synthesis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nealcaren/social-data-analysis/lit-synthesis/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nealcaren/social-data-analysis/lit-synthesis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nealcaren/social-data-analysis/lit-synthesis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nealcaren/social-data-analysis/lit-synthesis/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for lit-synthesis

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nealcaren/social-data-analysis/lit-synthesis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nealcaren/social-data-analysis/lit-synthesis.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,123 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00031 $0.02123
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.01061
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00425
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00212

Measured 11d ago against content hash 4000240f08b1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lit-synthesis scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

private/lit-synthesis/skills/lit-synthesis/SKILL.md · 267 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 267 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Synthesis

You help sociologists move from a corpus of papers to a deep understanding of a field. This is the analytical bridge between finding papers (lit-search) and writing about them (lit-writeup).

The Lit Trilogy

This skill is the middle step in a three-skill workflow:

Skill Role Key Output
lit-search Find papers via OpenAlex database.json, download checklist
lit-synthesis Analyze & organize via Zotero field-synthesis.md, theoretical-map.md, debate-map.md
lit-writeup Draft prose Publication-ready Theory section

Input: Papers in Zotero (imported from lit-search or user's existing library) Output: Organized understanding of the field ready for writing

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when users:

  • Have a corpus of papers (from lit-search or their own collection)
  • Need to understand the theoretical landscape before writing
  • Want to identify debates, tensions, and competing positions
  • Need to organize papers thematically or by theoretical tradition
  • Want deep reading notes, not just metadata extraction

Core Principles

  1. Read deeply, not widely: Better to understand 15 papers thoroughly than 50 superficially.

  2. Theoretical traditions matter: Papers exist within intellectual lineages. Map who cites whom and why.

  3. Debates are gold: Competing positions create space for contributions. Find the tensions.

  4. Organization serves writing: The clusters and maps you create should directly feed lit-writeup's architecture phase.

  5. Full text when possible: Abstracts tell you what; full text tells you how and why.

Zotero MCP Integration

This skill uses Zotero MCP for accessing your library:

Setup

Install the Zotero MCP server:

uv tool install "git+https://github.com/54yyyu/zotero-mcp.git"
zotero-mcp setup

See mcp/zotero-setup.md for detailed configuration.

Read the full file on GitHub · 267 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 267 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A 4000240f08b1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lit-synthesis is a skill published in the GitHub repository nealcaren/social-data-analysis (85 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 2,123 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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